Tabernacle, Aberystwyth, R.I.P

I learned at the after-meeting in church this week that Tabernacle Chapel, Aberystwyth, has been destroyed by fire. When I was a student at Aberystwyth between 1998 and 2002, the chapel was in its last days as a living church. The church closed in 2003, when the 63-member congregation, which had been meeting in a chapel built for almost 2,000, caused some controversy when they refused to amalgamate with the congregation at Capel y Morfa, the other Welsh Presbyterian congregation. Return visits showed a chapel sliding into dereliction, which had obviously been broken ito several times.

Earlier this month, it was set alight by some of the people who broke in. It was declared unsafe, and has been demolished. Ichabod.

This chapel was the most obvious landmark in the town. The gap left will be like an extracted front tooth. It is the second chapel to come down in two decades not to be replaced. Both were Welsh-speaking Presbyterian chapels. The denomination that sprang from the work of Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland is dying on its feet, with the other denominations following suit.

Some may ask why I am so upset by the loss of these buildings, after all, they are only bricks and mortar. Well, bricks and mortar stand for something. These huge chapels stood for a world in which God was glorified, in which God walked through the land. Later, when Captain Ernest Evans, MP for Cardiganshire and later the University of Wales, they stood for a world in which the chapels mattered. That world is passing away, and the disappearance of massive civic-style buildings such as these goes alongside with the disapearance of Christianity from our national life.

It is easy to fall for the 'house-church' idea that these buildings were in some sense illegitimate, or the conservation mentality which would preserve these buildings with other uses (which I happen to believe is better thena their demolition). Rather, we should pray that these be raised again.

We are to watch for the vanishing landmarks, for they tell us that this is a nation under judgement.